MH17: Tony Abbott says all Australia wants to do is recover the dead

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has sought to reassure Russia, the Ukraine and the Russian-backed rebels who control the MH17 crash zone that Australia has no other purpose than to recover the victims and leave.

“Our whole and sole purpose is to claim our dead and bring them home as quickly as we can and that is what this next phase of Operation Bring Them Home is all about,” he said.

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Negotiations with warring separatists have been delicate and Mr Abbott, his special envoy Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Tony Negus all stressed the military-free, “non-threatening” aim of the unarmed Dutch-led recovery force.

“This is a police mission, not a military mission,” said Mr Abbott. “Yes, there are some ADF [Australian Defence Force] enablers involved. Yes there's always in circumstances like this a certain amount of contingency work but this is a police mission, not a military one. It's a humanitarian mission.

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“There is inevitably an element of risk in this. Frankly, we need to be prepared to take some risks in order to do the right thing by our dead and by their grieving families.”

Mr Abbott, who spoke to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine on Sunday, said there was “near universal acknowledgement that an atrocity has taken place, certainly that something dreadful has taken place”.

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Entry to the site for the “coalition of the grieving” was negotiated by the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Mr Negus said the initial assessment team, which was due into the area by late Sunday Australian time, would decide how many people would be needed to retrieve remains and search the wreckage.

''There are five identified major sites of wreckage and they will be be seeing what numbers they require on site,” he said.

“We've forward-positioned a large amount of people should a large amount of people be required. If they're not required those people can wait back and replace our people as time goes on. But the assessment team will be making those judgments over the next 24 hours.”

Mr Abbott said he would be "very surprised" if the operation went longer than two or three weeks.

"This is a volatile situation, this is contested ground, and we don't want to be there any longer than is absolutely necessary," Mr Abbott said.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said he had spoken with Mr Abbott on Sunday and offered him Labor's full support for the mission and the decision to send in unarmed personnel.

"The priority is and must continue to be the recovery of the bodies, their identification and their repatriation to grieving families," Mr Shorten said.

"In a dangerous and volatile environment, this is the most sensible course of action."